As Puzzling as Her Fiction

...In A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), the narrator breaks off her tale frequently to give the reader friendly advice from her own experience...

...She would never have had an affair with the drawing master or the choir leader...

...Christina Kay provided a wholly different cultural encounter...

...He resented her success as a novelist, she says, and "always made out that my narrative writing was a frivolous activity...

...Meanwhile she had continued to publish poems...

...The impression it made is evident in one of her youthful poems, where an inhabitant of another planet looks up at the sky and observes, "The Earth twinkles clearly tonight...

...Several unremarkable letters from schoolmates are included as "documentary evidence" of that recognition...

...I had been thinking about autobiographies in general," Spark says as the narrator of Loitering with Intent (1981), "and had perceived that memoirs are only valuable if they are extremely unusual in themselves, or if they attach to an interesting end-product...

...To illustrate her point, she tells of a family vacation several years earlier with her English grandparents, who kept a village store...

...Nobody could doubt that Muriel Spark meets the requirement as end-product, so it should come as no surprise that she has now, at age 75, given us Curriculum Vitae...

...was mentally disturbed...

...Other girls were marrying...

...The fact that in the novel Miss Brodie is ultimately betrayed by Sandy, the student who represents Stark, would seem to tell us something about the author herself...

...She followed him and was married there, despite the urg-ings of a shipboard suitor and his parents, who seemed to sense that she was heading for disaster...

...I have had reason to complain on several occasions of your manner of lifting and reading papers which happen to be lying on my desk," she wrote to one William Kean Seymour, who was "totally against" her...

...Engaging as readers will find these recollections, they will welcome the moment Muriel lands in the classroom of Christina Kay, later to be recognized by her former pupils in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962...

...Her grandmother, she reports, replied: "You have to feed 'em at both ends...

...Throughout the film version—which Spark liked—Maggie Smith plays the role as a caricature, eventually revealing the villainy beneath her goodness...

...He gave me the book to review and a check for 15 pounds for having made him laugh.' Frustratingly, not one line is quoted for our amusement...

...After leaving the monastery where she had taken refuge to write The Comforters, Spark had the luck to find a home with Tiny Lazzari, a helpful landlady and ever-faithful supporter...

...But a perceptive reader's search for answers beneath the surface may give Spark's latest book the appeal of her most enticingly sinister novels...

...The author's voice warms with gratitude to Graham Greene, who rescued her with a monthly stipend (often accompanied by a case of wine) when she reached the danger point of malnutrition...

...amusing, very eccentric, short, frail and almost totally bald...

...In a sense," Spark admits, "Miss Kay was nothing like Miss Brodie...

...During that spring she started working for an ultra-secret group that concocted and broadcast false news meant to demoralize the German people...

...Her mother, being English, failed these tests...

...on weekends they dined at the Savoy, the Ritz, Cafe Royal, and Prunier's, luxury new to her...

...After recounting an early childhood with her part-Jewish but wholly Edin-burghian father and embarrassingly English mother, she relaxes a little from a reference-book style of short segments on subjects like "Bread," "Butter" and "Tea," to describe such moments as being greeted at age five by a policeman guiding schoolchildren across the street...

...Battles raged among pathetically minor poets and poetry lovers...

...Graduation at 17 led to a surprisingly directionless two years, combining teaching and secretarial study, an ordinary job or two, and random reading: a life of Shelley, her initial taste of Hemingway (A Farewell to Arms), Eric Link-later's Poet's Pub, plus Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers...

...So many strange and erroneous accounts of parts of my life have been written since I became well known," she explains in her Introduction, "that I felt it time to put the record straight...

...Miss Kay predicted my future as a writer in the most emphatic terms," Spark says...

...An avid lecture-goer, Miss Kay shared what she had learned, for instance, from the musicologist Donald Francis Tovey...

...The section seems to be meant primarily for readers who think they know every twist of the dagger plunged into someone's vitals, but know it wrong...

...Spark's home in London was the Helena Club, a frugal women's hostel that would become the scene of another novel, The Girls of Slender Means (1963...

...As in the case of Miss Kay, Spark's account raises teasing questions about the disparity between her life and her fiction...

...Spark next disposes of Derek Stanford, with whom she had a "literary partnership" that presumably involved more than their collaboration on a life of Cardinal Newman...

...he became dangerous and Muriel divorced him, but not before they had a son...

...It proved to be a long and charming friendship," she says discreetly...

...For those who know her fiction, Muriel Spark's memoir will provoke many questions...

...Spark had kept some 500 of Stanford's letters—many hitherto left unopened in dread of the certain update on his ailments—and cites them to support her indignation over stolen manuscripts and his false statements in critical writing about her...

...Then Sydney Oswald Spark, 13 years her senior, brought "bunches of flowers" to cheer a siege of flu...

...In A Far Cry from Kensington Tiny becomes Milly—and her house, strangely, is transformed into a menacing environment where the Polish dressmaker Wanda, in the pattern of previous Spark characters, suffers persecution from a mysterious, perhaps supernatural source...

...One day she listened secretly (a habit that would enrich her fiction) to gossip about a neighbor's marital woes...

...Yet if The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie presents a character resembling Spark's benefactor in many positive respects, it also ridicules and demeans her...

...They resulted from her regularly using dexedrine as an appetite-suppressant to save food money, and apparently stirred in her a continuing need to deal with supernatural experience...

...She describes with pride the method she devised for getting the half-aware old woman from the bed to the commode...

...At age 13 Muriel was often left to care for her now bedridden and widowed grandmother while her parents went out for the evening...

...Indeed, this autobiography makes her even more interesting, albeit in unexpected ways...

...the servants want to prevent any interruption of the deed that will make their life stories worth money...

...For in the course of relating her story, the author inadvertently exposes a number of puzzling contradictions concerning her work, giving the book a dimension that goes beyond its stated purpose...

...The writer's recollections of her years there glow with happiness (and Tiny appears, smiling in a garden, among the book's photographs of the people most important to her...

...Because the typical Spark atmosphere of paranoia in A Far Cry differs so vividly from the author's cozy remembrance of Tiny's home in Curriculum Vitae, the contrast suggests one more intriguing puzzle...

...Claiming she "could go on for pages," Spark nonetheless ends the retrospective of her literary collisions...

...Spark feels lucky to have entered school equipped with an earthy knowledge denied to children "cosied up in a nursery...

...She lined her classroom with reproductions of the best Dutch and Italian art, and took promising students to theaters and museums...

...Backed by her documents, Spark defends herself through a real-life farce that is much less amusing than it might be made to appear in her fiction...

...In one instance, she tells of walking with the editor of the Month magazine to his office: "I felt in the mood to entertain him with some amusing stories...

...O. S." had a three-year teaching appointment in Africa...

...One item assured them that the attempt to assassinate Hitler had done him no injury: A bomb had merely blown off his trousers...

...Its story (like Waugh's Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold) grew out of real hallucinations...

...they saw one of Anna Pavlova's last performances as the dying swan...

...The novel treats Milly gently, but its tone is set by Wanda, whose torment leads her to commit suicide in the Thames...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" Much of Muriel Spark's fiction has an autobiographical tone...

...When she told another parent that she had "some shopping to do," Muriel "nearly died...

...Only rarely able to see Robin, who after nearly two years had been brought to Britain and turned over to her parents in Edinburgh, she survived on the six pounds a week she earned in her first postwar job with the glossy magazine Argentor...

...The teacher is made out as absurd, even vicious...

...Her mother asked idly how men could possibly be kept happy...

...They were right...

...her browbeating of one humble student drives the girl to her death...

...Under her teacher's influence Muriel developed, between the ages of 11 and 14, the ambition for her craft...

...Her teenage diligence elicits admiration, but also wonder: Did her withering portrayal of the horrible old people in Memento Mori (1959) serve as some kind of revenge...

...Evelyn Waugh, another converted Catholic (more acceptant than Greene or Spark of all its dicta), set her on a sure road to success with his review of her first novel, The Comforters (1957...

...Though her plot may move through threat, malevolence, pain, and death, she has mastered the art of beguiling the reader with the voice of one who reveals—sometimes mischievously—dark and dubious secrets to a trusted confidant...

...one, "The Go-Away Bird," expressed her complex enchantment with Africa, subsequently amplified in the novella of the same name that became the title piece of her 1960 collection...

...The baffling-ly correct Edinburgh way to announce grocery buying was, "I've got to get the messages...

...It is at this juncture that Curriculum Vitae starts in earnest to correct others' errors...

...A farcical early novella features a group of servants hanging a do not disturb sign outside the room where the Baron is about to murder his wife and commit suicide...

...Yet her sparse chronicle of the struggle offers little of the narrative richness one might expect of a literary biography...

...Spark goes so far as to say that "Miss Kay would have put the fictional character firmly in her place...

...She discloses little about the effect of that line of work on her thinking, though when referring to her erroneous biographers in the Introduction, she remarks, "Lies are like fleas hopping from here to there, sucking the blood of the intellect...

...S.O.S...

...I felt I had hardly much choice in the matter...

...Along with feminist views (that Spark somehow seems to have lost) and devotion to art, she stirred an interest in science strong enough to set Muriel reading The Mysterious Universe by the astronomer Sir James Jeans...

...I have not relied on my memory alone, vivid though it is...

...My private affairs are no concern of yours...

...He was an only child...

...Over the "scrambler" phone she came to know Colin Meth-ven in the Foreign Office...

...With carefully extenuating details Spark tells of depositing her small son, Robin, at a Catholic boarding school in Rhodesia and returning to England in 1944...

...Knowing the Scottish way of asking her name, she answered promptly, "Muriel Camberg...

...Worried about the scholars who might copy and multiply those errors, and having the wherewithal of a lifelong hoarder, she set for herself what would seem a limiting program: "I determined to write nothing that cannot be supported by documentary evidence or by eyewitnesses...

...He was bookish with scholarly leanings, but, as I found gradually, and later on to my cost, wildly and almost constitutionally inaccurate...

...How she felt as an adolescent about being shut in with this heavy duty and her homework she does not indicate...

...But Christina Kay by that time was already dead from cancer, quite helpless to defend her life from travesty...

...What do they cry you...

...Muriel Camberg wanted to see the world, and "S...

...she began shortly to publish poetry and win prizes...

...To Marie Stopes, the champion of birth control, who had inquired about her divorce, she wrote, "I have received your outrageously impudent letter of 27th May...

...he inquired...

...Spark moves quickly to the day when, at age 29 ("an extremely attractive Scot," according to a letter published here), she was named editor of Poetry Review...

...She devotes the last small fraction of her book to the im-poverished years spent, at great cost to her health, trying to make a place for herself in the literary world—first with her poetry, criticism and biographical works on Charlotte Bronte and John Masefield, and finally with her fiction...